Why your diet can’t deliver
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Why your diet can’t deliver
Everyone is looking for diets that work fast to lose weight fast – the best diet plans, the weight loss miracle food, the one diet plan that will solve it all.
I have been on many diets in my life – so many I’ve lost count – and I have discovered that diets don’t work, and now understand why all our diets can’t deliver. I have many funny stories about diets, but actually none of them are really funny – they just show how desperate I was feeling at the time.
Honestly, when we fail to lose weight, or if we lose it and put it all back on again, who gets to feel bad? We do. We turn inwards to beat ourselves up, put ourselves down and generally make ourselves wrong, or not enough.
Feeling bad about myself eroded my self-worth and was as big an issue as my weight.
Dieting saga
I started dieting at the age of 10 – I weighed 10 stone (63kg/139lbs). I continued dieting and at 11 years old weighed 11 stone (69kg/152lbs). I kept dieting and at 13 years of age weighed 13 stone (82kg/180lbs). I plateaued there for a while, but hit 15 stone (95kg/209lbs) when I was 22. After that I felt so bad I stopped weighing myself and refused to allow anyone to tell me how heavy I was.
I could say that I’m living proof that diets don’t work . . .
In 2005 I was probably over 17 stone (107kg / 238lbs). I wore size 24/26 (UK) clothing and was pretty miserable about my body and my weight. I hated how uncomfortable my body made me feel and no matter how much I used clothes to disguise my fat, it never fooled anyone. Diets to lose weight didn’t work.
I attended a workshop (which had nothing to do with weight loss) where I experienced the Gentle Breath Meditation® and then everything slowly began to change. The gentle breath helped me to...
Stop, Connect and Listen
...to the innermost me, which felt very, very, still. This feeling of stillness and completeness felt natural, though far different from the way I had been living. I liked this feeling of ease and committed to making opportunities to connect to myself throughout my day, and was able to be aware of how it felt to be gentle with myself in actions and in my movements. It was having a tenderness with all, including myself, in word, action and thoughts. As I connected with the Gentle Breath and movements in this way, I began to feel what was going on in my body.
"To breathe your own breath will bring you the real you. The real you paves the way for the true you."
Serge Benhayon Esoteric Teachings and Revelations, p 512
I soon began to connect with this gentleness, and it felt very natural. I’d just been choosing hardness and disconnection instead.
I began to touch things gently, made my food gently, typed gently – and as I did, I connected more and more to what my body was feeling. I began to hear what it was telling me. I started to play with what to eat and what to avoid. They were all experiments. I started to respond to what my body told me I needed to eat and what did not feel good to eat, rather than following rules or the desires of my taste buds. Slowly my weight began to change but that was not the end of the story – I would still find myself overeating.
So why then did I still overeat?
I was never perfect – and worse, would fall back into beating myself up for not being perfect, which felt more harmful than the actual overeating. Time to discover what was really going on here to break this toxic cycle.
I had a lot of bad things happen to me as a child, so I was carrying a lot of hurt. As soon as I felt any of the hurt I would feel bad and would find all manner of reasons for overeating, all the time trying to not feel the hurts by stuffing any feelings down with food. I didn't realise how much the old hurts were still affecting me.
The cycle looked like this:
How I broke the cycle
I was still working with the Gentle Breath Meditation® and it took a while to tune in and listen to what I was feeling as I’d been so used to ignoring the information my body naturally provided. But gradually I could feel the difference:
- When I ate sugar and when I didn’t
- When I ate gluten and when I didn’t
- When I ate dairy and when I didn’t
I sought additional support from Esoteric Healing modalities to discover why I was overeating.
The more I learned to listen to and follow my body’s messages as to what was not right for my body and what worked, I lost weight and, I also broke the cycle of choosing to eat and bury what I was feeling, by no longer eating food to cope with my life choices.
I did it by allowing a healing of my hurts with the support of Universal Medicine, and by taking responsibility for connecting to and feeling my body. Now I’m down to a size 10/12 (UK), a size that feels just right for me.
"Your body is always ready and very willing to communicate with you. Be very still, feel, and listen."
Serge Benhayon Esoteric Teachings and Revelations, p 316
I know now that if I’m craving something it’s a clear sign that I’m not connected and I am not listening to the messages that my body has been giving me. The craving is shouting at me to pay attention to what I’m really feeling and to acknowledge it. I have learnt that:
It’s never about the food!
It’s always about stopping, connecting and listening to how we are feeling.
It’s a radical thought that it’s NEVER ABOUT THE FOOD!.
Diets make it ALL about the food! What food we can eat and what we can’t eat, yet what I have found is it’s ALWAYS about the INSIDE and our CONNECTION to ourselves.
When we develop ways to stop, connect and feel what is really driving us to eat, we can begin to know how we are feeling and what is right for us.
For example, a friend of mine recently commented that whenever she had been rushing all day to get things done at work, she would inevitably arrive home in search of sweets to take the edge off how she was feeling. However, if she maintained her natural pace and ease with completing tasks, despite the external pressure, she found that the urge to eat sweets upon arriving home was greatly diminished.
Without that connection, we can easily ignore that feeling that something is not right for us...
It really is as simple as CONNECTION FIRST
Could this be the real answer to weight gain and weight loss and why diets don’t work?
Developing this simple connection with ourselves can bring a gentle tenderness to our lives and for me has disproved everything we have been told and sold by the diet industry about losing weight. It can show us why diets can’t deliver the weight loss they promise.
Weight loss diets to reduce body fat fast appear to offer a solution, but when they don’t work, they leave us feeling that we are the failures. Diets to lose weight fast or the very best diet plans to lose body fat just do not work long term. [i]
Why seek a ‘solution’ that makes us all feel bad?
Diets don’t deliver, connection to ourselves does.
Why is obesity on the increase?
Why is obesity on the increase when we know more about nutrition and diet than ever before?
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Filed under
Diets, Connection, Weight-loss
